But that was over a month ago, and Sherlock needed a new diversion to prevent another crack-induced manic episode. Mrs. Hudson put the tea tray down as I read through the potential cases. Most of the requests for help were the usual twaddle, a missing dog or a necklace that Holmes said was clearly taken by the maid. There was one that briefly held some interest—a missing child—until Sherlock surmised that the father had absconded with the boy because the mother refused him visitation rights. He claimed there was something in the wording of the woman’s email that had led him to that conclusion; I personally didn’t see it. Holmes sent the distraught mother an email informing her that perhaps if she hadn’t used the child as a weapon against his father, the father wouldn’t have resorted to such measures, and that perhaps she should endeavour to be a better and less selfish parent.
Her response had been less than friendly.
A text message from Lestrade, sent from a crime scene along with a photo, finally caught Sherlock’s attention for longer than five seconds. The dismembered body of a well-dressed white businessman, found in Mamelodi Township, was not something that happened every day, and was therefore noteworthy to Holmes.
“Watson,” he said after sucking on his e-cig, the blue LED light glowing in the dimly-lit room. The blinds were closed. Holmes had a hangover and bright sunlight bothered his bloodshot eyes. “I think Lestrade will be out of his depth on this one, as per usual, and it would only be right if we did our civic duty and solved it for him.” With that, he stood, tossed the car keys at me and marched out of the room. He winced as the bright sunlight hit his eyes and a pair of sunglasses was promptly propped up on his nose.
We drove from our small office on Baker Street in Brooklyn and then down Jan Shoba, before we turned into Stanza Bopape.
A beggar outside the Silverton Police Station held a cardboard sign declaring that he would rather starve than steal. I’d seen the same sign a few days ago being held by another beggar outside our office; it was evidently doing the rounds. Silverton was a lower-middle class suburb, and also the heart of the motor industry in the city. We could see the decline in the value of houses as we drew closer to Mamelodi.
Inside Mamelodi itself, we found a mix of small houses with well-tended patches of garden next door to tin shanties or shacks built out of whatever building materials could be pilfered from the surrounding area. Mixed in with the informal shacks and small one-bedroom homes—which housed ten people—were larger houses that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the more affluent suburbs.
The body had been dumped next to the river, and the smell from the stagnant, polluted water made me gag. The odour from the water was worse than the stench from the corpse, which was still relatively fresh. He’d only been killed the night before. Somehow the stink of it didn’t affect Sherlock, though. His nose was always raised up in the air, above the rest of us. Lestrade stood next to the body, holding his nose. Unfortunately, the Vicks vapour rub he’d smeared under his nose to combat the stench from the river didn’t seem to be doing the trick this time around. His handlebar moustache was caked with the stuff. His ample beer gut protruded over his belt and prevented him from bending over the body to get a proper look.
From a quick evaluation, I saw that the victim’s right hand was missing, as were his genitals, and several organs, including his heart and lungs. His wallet had been emptied and discarded in the bushes nearby.
“From the blood splatter and pooling, I’d say he was still alive when they mutilated him. He died from exsanguination,” I stated.
“Been watching Dexter reruns, Watson?” Lestrade jibbed.
“No, it’s called having a medical degree,” I answered. “But you wouldn’t know anything about having a degree, would you? Since you barely finished high school.”
“You may have a medical degree, but at least I didn’t piss everything away at the poker tables,” Lestrade said, knowing just where to twist the knife.
Holmes surveyed the body for a few seconds, ignoring our unfriendly banter. He bent down and sniffed the corpse.
“I detect a hint of olive oil,” he said as he stood.
“We think the main motive was robbery, and his organs were taken for the black market. There’s money to be made with organs. Some of these guys will sell their own kidney for a few hundred bucks.” Lestrade nodded to himself. “I know you prefer the strange cases, but I think we may have called you prematurely. We’ve got this one covered.”
“But why take his hand, organs, and genitals if the motive is just robbery?” I asked.
“I’m not disputing that this has to do with the black market, Lestrade. But it’s not the black market you’re thinking about. This man’s right hand has been removed. Typically, in traditional witchcraft, or muti in the vernacular, the right hand is the power hand, the one that is used to attract wealth; but he was not right-handed. Our victim was left-handed. There is no watch tan line on the remaining wrist. This leads me to conclude that the attacker did not know the victim personally, otherwise he would have taken his left hand instead, since that was his power hand.”
“How do you know he was wearing a watch?” I asked.
“The tell-tale signs of wear and tear on the right cuff of his shirt where his watch caught.”
“And that just goes to prove that the motive was robbery! They chopped off his hand to take the watch,” Lestrade interjected with a hint of self-satisfaction.
“While one of the motives may have been robbery, it was only a secondary concern,” Holmes said. “Whoever took his hand and other organs was an idiot, a thug for hire, sent out with a list of ingredients. Our victim’s body parts happened to be part of the recipe, and another of the ingredients is olive oil, which is also often associated with money or wealth-attracting spells. I suspect that this is probably a variation on the hand of glory, except that our victim was not hanged.”
“And maybe they’re cannibals and are going to use the olive oil to cook the hand and organs,” I said with a sarcastic smile. “Also, why was he here? This isn’t exactly the sort of place the rich like to frequent.”
“You’d be surprised what kinds of people find their way into Mamelodi at night. He was probably looking for some strange,” Lestrade leered.
“Well... the strange certainly found him,” I said with a smirk.
Sherlock ignored us and surveyed the area, scrutinised the ground again, and touched the mud close to the body. There had only been a light drizzle the previous night, not enough to wash away the blood, but enough to wet the ground. There were tracks from the police and crime scene unit; the likelihood of finding tracks from the killer was minute, if not impossible.
“He went that way,” Holmes said, pointing downriver.
“How the hell do you know that?” I couldn’t help myself. “There’s no way you could know that for sure. Those tracks are a mess. Nobody could discern the murderer’s tracks from every other cop’s prints.”
“Quite easily done, my dear Watson,” he said looking down at me from his six-foot-four-inch height. His nose hairs needed a trim. “If you examine these tracks, consider the shoes, body weight and height of the police officers—and I use that term lightly, since they resemble a herd of elephants and not a proper constabulary—you will find that there is a set of tracks that stands out from the rest. Cast your glance at these imprints,” he pointed at a barely perceptible smear on the riverbank. “The heel of the left shoe is cracked and the sole of the right foot has been worn down at the big toe. The depth of the imprint suggests a heavyset man, probably muscular rather than fat. He slipped in the mud because of a limp due to his right leg being shorter than his left by an inch, probably due to an injury of some sort. This is not the shoe print of a policeman, but of our murderer.” Sherlock stood waiting for applause that wouldn’t come; instead his deductions were met by grudging silence.
“The game’s a foot,” he said with a grin and stalked off in the direction the tracks led. Sherlock was at his happies
t when tracking a killer. Lestrade and I looked at each other, shrugged and followed him. We were both used to following him, even if it meant being shot or stabbed, which had happened to both of us on more than one occasion.
“Wait,” I said to Lestrade. “What about the body?”
“The coroner will take care of it,” he said with a dismissive gesture of his hand.
Holmes walked ahead of us, his tall body bent, his eyes intent on the trail, ignoring his surroundings. The entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well in Mamelodi. We passed small businesses set up in shacks built out of concrete bricks. The services offered were painted on the walls. A hairdresser braided a woman’s hair under a tree. A queue formed outside a tuck-shop advertising fresh chickens. A backyard mechanic worked on a client’s dilapidated car on an oil-stained pavement. The car would probably not pass its roadworthy test, but the mechanic got it started, to the delighted cheer of the car’s owner. A few hundred-rand notes exchanged hands and the car drove away, sending up a puff of black smoke in its wake. The mountain stood sentinel on our left-hand side, and the township spread out in front of us as far as we could see.
Sherlock veered right, away from the river and the mountain, into the belly of the settlement. He came to an abrupt halt, bent down and stared at the ground around him, a dusty patch of dirt and gravel with only a few tufts of grass growing wild.
“Lost the trail?” Lestrade asked. Holmes ignored him, continuing to stare and frown. He stood once more and walked down a narrow street that was little more than a dirty alley. A mongrel that looked more like an overgrown sewer rat yapped as we walked passed it. The pungent smell of decay wafted from a small shack built a short distance away from the other houses. The word Inyanga, along with a list of services offered, was painted on the front wall. The shaman offered to heal illness, remove curses, provide protection from evil, find lost property, and perform money spells. Drying herbs hung from the tin roof, along with a variety of small bones, which I hoped were only animal bones, but on closer inspection realised were not. My stomach lurched.
“I think we’re in the right place,” I said.
“Of course we are,” Holmes said and tapped his index finger against the side of his nose. “Q.E.D.” As though there would be any doubt that his tracking skills would find the killer’s destination.
We stood outside the shack like three scared teenage girls in front of a haunted house. A few herbs and indigenous plants that I assumed were used for healing potions or tinctures grew like weeds in the small garden. Another emaciated mongrel with rotting teeth strained against its fetters as it barked at us. I couldn’t help but wonder if it carried rabies. A small, shrivelled woman with a cane stepped out of the dark doorway into the light and silenced the dog with a single stomp of her walking stick. As she tilted her head, I noticed the milky-white cataracts. Her hair was braided with white and black beads and bits of shell or bone. When she moved her head, they rattled against each other. Her feet were bare and gnarled, dirty, toes curled over the edge of the threshold. Those feet had never seen a pair of shoes. She looked at us as though she could see our cowardice flashing in bright neon lights above our heads. A smile stole across her face, exposing toothless gums. She looked harmless enough, but her smile sent icy tentacles up my spine.
She was just an old woman, I tried to tell myself. I looked over at Holmes and Lestrade; the detective looked the way I felt. Sherlock seemed to be holding up better than Lestrade and myself.
“Are you going to stand outside all day?” She asked with a strong clear voice that would have been more suited to a much younger woman. “It’s going to be a hot one, hey,” she said turning her face into the sun and closing her eyes. “And you whities tend to get burned.” She cackled, covering her mouth with her arthritic hands.
Holmes stepped forward and we followed him at a respectable distance. Sherlock always tended to run where angels feared to tread. The infuriating man had never heard of self-preservation. Sometimes I wondered if he had a death wish, or thought he was immortal. He certainly had a God complex. I, on the other hand, had quite enough scars and was not in the mood to end up in the casualty ward again. The old woman disappeared into the darkness beyond the entrance to her shack. A multi-coloured beaded curtain covered the doorway and brushed against our faces as we walked through the entrance. The smooth mud floors smelled of cow dung. Peach pips had been pushed into the floor when newly wet to form an intricate pattern. The room was cool and dark. Paraffin lamps lit the windowless space; their smoke hung in the air, making it hard to breathe. My lungs craved fresh air. The spots floating before my eyes could just have been dust particles, but I suspected they were those stars you see when you’re not getting enough oxygen.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I noticed the walls were lined with shelves, each shelf holding an assortment of bottles, jars, and rusty cans. Dry herbs stood like flower arrangements in the cans. The contents of the glass jars and bottles made my bile rise. Sherlock went from one bottle to the next, examining each with interest. A pair of floating brown eyeballs stared at me from a jar. Another held a small aborted foetus of about sixteen weeks. The dismembered hand of what I assumed was a gorilla lay discarded and collecting dust next to the bottle containing the foetus. A still beating heart thumped inside another jar. A pale Lestrade stood at the door, refusing to come any further. In the centre of the room was a cooking fire with a pot hanging above it; the smell wafting from the pot was unappetising to say the least. The old woman sat in a chair that was probably as old as she was and stoked the fire. Something wriggled under the dirty sheets of a single bed with a sagging mattress in the corner. My imagination ran riot and thoughts of snakes and rats and other nightmarish things cavorted under the blanket. With my heart in my throat I strode over to the bed and ripped the blanket off, half expecting the killer we’d tracked there to jump out at me. Instead, a child of about four blinked at me, yawned, stretched, cast a wary eye in the old woman’s direction and then jumped off the bed and scampered out the shack. It took a few seconds for my heart to realise that it could stop racing.
Holmes turned from the shelves and faced the old woman, who in turn stared vacantly in his direction. His cigarette glowed in the dark as he puffed and considered her.
“He seems to not be here,” Holmes said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Lestrade said from the safety of the doorway.
“Who did you think you’d find here?” she asked.
“A killer,” I answered.
“You will find many things here, but not who you came looking for. What you find here will make you wish you hadn’t come looking,” she said, staring into the gloom. She tried to get out of the chair to stir the contents of the pot, but fell backwards with a grunt.
“Let me help you,” I said lifting the lid off the pot and burning my hand in the process. The cast iron lid hit the floor and my stomach reacted violently to what I saw floating in the grimy pot.
“What is it, Watson?” I heard Holmes say through the shocked fuzz that built up in my ears. I shook my head as I stepped away from the pot. He stood next to me and stared into the cooking utensil. The door behind us slammed shut and the bit of light that had filtered through the beaded curtain disappeared. Lestrade’s breathing was heavier from fright and sounded as though he was right at my ear instead of across the room. The only light now came from the smoky lanterns.
“What’s in the pot, Watson?” Lestrade asked. His voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper.
“It’s offal,” Holmes answered for me. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Remember my comment about cannibals chopping the hand off to eat it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Watson,” Holmes said sniffing the pot. “This isn’t human flesh, and the hand would be used in a wealth attraction spell, not eaten. It’s probably in the process of being cured right now.”
“And what about his heart and lungs, and his testicles?” I asked. Like most men, th
e thought of having my own testicles removed made my hands instinctively cover my groin.
“The testicles would be used in a fertility spell, and his other organs are probably being sold on the black market as we speak,” Sherlock said in a matter-of-fact tone.
The old witch just smiled at us.
“Can we go now?” Lestrade said as he took a step back towards the door.
“In a minute,” Holmes said as he looked around the room, squinting to see what was hidden in the dark corners. A frown scrunched up his brow. I watched as the offal boiled, steam rose, and Lestrade banged against the closed door which wouldn’t open under his panicked barrage.
“I think we’re trapped,” Lestrade choked out the words.
“Nonsense,” I said as I made my way over to him.
The witch cackled as I tried to open the door gently, pretending that panic didn’t have a vice-like grip on my brain. I gave up trying to be calm and tried to force it open. The harder I pushed the door, the louder she laughed. My shoulder ached and sweat dripped from my brow, but the door was no closer to being open.
Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets Page 7
